Many things in life baffle me. Things like: why do people participate in a global capitalist system doing shit jobs they hate for a system which does not benefit them? Why do so many people wear such ugly shoes? Why are there no truly revolutionary people living in the UK? Why do so many women look like drag queens nowadays? Why does no-one care about (data) privacy? All baffling stuff. However, the Truly Baffling Thing which has occupied my thoughts most frequently over the last two years is: why, in the midst of a global pandemic which is disproportionately affecting the metabolically unhealthy, are people not making an effort to get healthy? Genuinely and truly baffling. It’s almost like people want to be ill and/or at risk.
A few years ago (well before COVID), I met a woman in the waiting room of the vets. She had been a community nurse during the time of the AIDS epidemic and she talked about the profound discrimination and stigmatisation that HIV+ people experienced at the beginning of the epidemic, even by other healthcare workers. I don’t remember all the details, but I remember realising that the stigmatisation and discrimination against HIV+ people, and those who cared for them, was way worse than I had realised. For a good while after meeting her, I would come back to her comments and wonder who I would have been at that time. Would I have been her or would I have been the majority who behaved so despicably and callously towards others out of a fear for their own personal safety? I’m pretty certain now that I would have been her, and not
I have no love for the NHS. By which I do not mean that I have no love of a nationalised health service, but rather that I have no love for what the NHS has become. Fundamentally, I believe that the NHS is not fit for purpose. In the main, my assessment of the NHS is not because of the medics and other healthcare workers employed by the NHS; my assessment is, almost exclusively, a criticism of the administration of it. It simply does not work.
I’m going to leave this post as a sticky and update it with links to essays and interviews on the COVID-19 pandemic I heartily recommend reading. Order represents the order I came across them, most recent at the top.
When I was in the beginning of the writing up phase of my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors handed back a chapter and rather matter of factly told me that it failed the ‘so what?’ test. It was brutal and it hurt, but his feedback ultimately led to a much better thesis. What he meant by the comment was: why should anyone care about what I had written? I had failed to make the case for why my story was important. I think that is probably the single most important question anyone can hold in their mind when they are communicating something they care about: am I telling people why this matters? I recently read a press release and corresponding article by Dr Peter Doshi of the BMJ which really shocked me. The current population-wide vaccine trials are not designed to answer the only question worth asking: do the vaccines